Chapter 1
How long had it been already?
Laurie held up her hand counted down the days on her fingers, and when she ran out of fingers and wasn’t done counting, realized it had been way too long.
She didn’t mind having the responsibility. She was the older sibling, and she only had the one brother. Still, with everything else she had going on, interfering in a family spat was the last thing she wanted to do. She hated conflict, and more than that, she hated getting caught in the middle when it had to do with her family. Still, she had to keep her brother safe, didn’t she? No matter how annoying it was.
No matter how annoying he was.
Still, if she could, she would have gladly dropped the responsibility on someone else's shoulders. But they didn’t have other relatives that would take him in, and he didn’t have any money of his own. He didn’t have a job, and she was pretty sure he'd cut off his education at high school if he even managed to graduate. No one ever told her for sure.
Even though a strong feeling of guilt swamped her every time, she still thought about sending him away. He had come to her seeking help. She could count how many times he'd done that and have several fingers left, it was so rare.
But she couldn’t exactly help how she felt, either. She had her life on track, finally. She had things how she wanted them. Sure, she didn’t have a lot of friends. She really didn’t go on a lot of dates. But she was in graduate school working toward her goals, and she could do whatever she wanted without answering to anyone.
Well, she could, before her brother showed up. He was a grown up, but it was hard to tell sometimes with the way he acted. Laurie had the feeling he needed constant supervision, but he didn’t want to be around her and honestly speaking, she could only stand him in small doses, so that was out of the question. It left her house and her things at risk. At least he was staying out of her kitchen so she didn’t have to worry about him breaking anything there, but he'd wreaked havoc in every other room already.
Maybe she should have attempted to soothe over the problem, instead of sheltering her brother. Her dad did more than enough of it. If she started to also, he would never grow up. Laurie needed her brother to be independent, if only for her sake. He wouldn’t just do it if she told him to, though. The only person who could ever get him to do something he wasn’t interested in doing, was their father.
In any case, talking it over wasn’t going to work, taking into account the stubbornness of the people in her family. She knew that already, but she would have liked a faster resolution that didn’t cost her too much. It had already cost her a room in her home and more than double the money she used for food every week. For all that her brother ate, he was too skinny.
But she could be out of it if she could just get them both in the same room and get them to talk…
She sighed. Like it would ever be that easy. Everyone in the family was stubborn and that included her, only she didn’t show it as freely as the men of her family did. Which meant she would have to deal with her brother a little longer.
Laurie was suffering through her third week of putting up with her brother after he was thrown out of the house by their bad-tempered father. Looking back, she wasn’t sure how she had survived, or why she had let him into her house in the first place. If she'd had any brains, she would have sent him home and not gotten in the middle of whatever fight they had been having. They fought often, though it was the first time their father had been so severe.
It hadn't even been an entire surprise when she heard that it happened. It said something about her family, that her dad tossing her little brother out like trash, wasn’t a surprise. He hadn't done it to her. She'd just left when she turned eighteen, then finished high school. She'd gone off to college with no intention of going back home, at least not to live. Though visits were pretty limited, she kept it up, since they were the only family she had, even if it didn’t feel that way most of the time.
Neither she nor her brother was even talking to their dad after he'd kicked Karl out. Laurie had wanted to, but her brother had convinced her to leave it alone, saying he didn’t want to talk to their dad yet and if she told him where he was staying, it would only make the situation worse. Laurie agreed because she didn’t want to be involved any deeper than she already was.
Still, she would have liked an explanation. At least a better one than the one her brother gave her when he showed up.
Their father had been a strict man growing up. Living in the same house for eighteen years had been something of a nightmare. Laurie had felt suffocated at worst. When it wasn’t as bad, she was just a little annoyed. There were the times when her dad had to be away because of his work, usually gone for long periods at a time, and she'd always loved those times. Because it felt very much like being let out of prison for a little bit.
If she had been the stereotypical, overly dramatic teenager, she would have been suffering from depression and running away at some point—she'd only gotten as far as thinking about it, though. Not that their dad was bad, just… hard to deal with in large doses sometimes. It had felt like having someone breathing down her neck twenty-four seven even while he was away. Because of that, even when he was gone, she'd still stick to his rules. Because she didn’t want to get punished when he got back to find something had gone wrong.
But why did he throw Karl out in the first place?
She had been shocked when her brother showed up on her doorstep suddenly. He'd taken a whole day to explain the situation to her, and then she'd just been angry. Of course, she couldn’t just march up to her dad and scold him like he was the kid—he was too intimidating for that. It wasn’t a tactic that would work well against General Thomas Nash, a man used to being under pressure because of his job. If anything, it would backfire on her; she would see him and turn tail and run off to safety.
Karl had insisted she not even try to go see him, though. She had been against that. Not only was her brother not the boss of her, she had honestly felt it was the best way to go. But she'd given in, in the face of his persistence, though reluctantly.
She could tell it frustrated him how she wouldn’t just go along with what he wanted, but he had to realize at some point that she wasn’t the same girl that had left their father's house at eighteen, even though he'd been a kid then. She was too used to her independence to just give it up, she was going along with him at the moment because she was angry with their dad as well, but it wouldn’t last forever.
As much as she cared about her brother, she wasn’t sure if he would ever leave, and already she was growing sick of his behavior. He didn’t have anywhere else to go, after all. She'd asked about friends, but he didn’t have any nearby that could take him in permanently. He didn’t even have much money since he'd been tossed out with just the clothes on his back, and a small backpack he'd managed to pack for himself before leaving.
They were giving their dad the silent treatment because they were both pissed off at him. Not that she spoke to him all that regularly, anyway. He probably wouldn’t miss them for several weeks yet, but just thinking that far ahead left her feeling exhausted. She would look after her brother, but she would complain about it. After getting so used to living by herself, looking after herself, suddenly having her independence invaded, left her reeling and irritated most of the time. But it was just her and her brother. She cared for her brother, but they weren’t brought up in an equal, or emotional environment and they couldn’t stand each other sometimes.
There was one thing that bugged her, though.
Karl didn’t like talking about what had happened much. That alone wasn’t so surprising, she couldn’t imagine it was a happy experience so she couldn’t fault him for not wanting to relive it. But he'd given her bare facts without going into much detail. Well, she didn’t feel she had any choice since he was family and he needed her. So, she took him at his word, and they both more or less declared war on their dad.
Of course, Laurie never once considered her brother could be the one in the wrong.
Karl had only told her so much, a lot of half-truths mixed in with a bunch of untruths, and the rest of it left to the imagination. And her family being as it had been, there was only one way her imagination would lead. Laurie could only assume what had gone down because she hadn't contacted her father to hear his side of the story. So, most of what she was sure had happened was based on assumptions from her own experience with their father.
Laurie had so far bought Karl's story that Dad threw him out for being bisexual, so she didn’t know the real truth yet.
It was plenty believable, though. Their father, being the rigid man that he was, would be against it, especially in one of his kids. If she'd given him the same proclamation, he would have gotten mad, too. He already looked down on her because of her gender, so it was a simple conclusion to reach.
Unaware of her brother's intentions, she put up with him believing she was doing the right thing, helping her brother even if it meant going against her father. Later, she would be cursing herself for her naiveté.
But, right then, her biggest problem was her brother's habits. They hadn't changed much from when she'd lived back home. Even though she was now twenty-six, and that meant she hadn't stayed at home for eight years. Then again, her brother was still only twenty-one now, older than a teenager but not quite an adult. Still, she would have appreciated if he at least looked after his own trash, aside from other chores. His resolve to act like a rebellious preteen was what made him staying so unbearable for her, but he didn’t seem to care that she could kick him out.
She wouldn’t though. Not when she felt he still needed her—even if he just needed her for food and shelter. Besides, she could be understanding. It was probably his first taste of freedom, and she remembered how her own was, how overwhelmed she had been. It was the only reason she had put up with him for the past couple of weeks with a minimum amount of fuss, though she didn’t stay completely silent, either.
Still, the thought of enduring another week did not appeal, and she wondered how many more weeks she could look forward to.
As she puttered around cleaning up Karl's messes inside and outside the house, she noticed a moving truck next door. Someone was moving into the too small, fixer-upper rental next door. She watched, curious, pausing in picking up the trash on her front lawn. It was mostly all gone, anyway, she was just a perfectionist when it came to this sort of thing, probably from back in the day when Dad had acted as an inspector after their chores—mostly hers—and would criticize every speck of disorder left unchecked.
When she saw him, her eyes became fixated on him. She'd just been taking a short break from her work, but having caught sight of him, she had no desire to go back to it. She could clean the mess up any other time, after all. Her mind was too preoccupied in her admiration.
He was tall and lanky, but muscular. She could see his coffee-colored hair, cut short, and imagined his eye color would be brown, or blue, or even hazel. He was dressed in casual workout gear, grey track pants, a white muscle shirt, and black and blue sneakers. He had a hoodie wrapped around his waist with the sleeves tied at the front. He wasn’t dressed in what looked like the official uniform the other movers were wearing, so she ventured a guess that he was the guy moving in, and felt her heart give a flip at the thought.
There was some distance between them and he wasn’t facing directly her way, so she couldn’t see his features clearly, but what she did see had her impressed enough to freeze her where she stood and forget everything else in her surroundings.
He saw her, too. Actually, he'd had his eye on her as the van pulled up. He hadn't expected someone to be outside, not from the house he was moving next to.
Mickey noticed her watching him—or, at least, in his general direction. She could have just been surprised, or curious about her new neighbor. But he had been thinking up a way to meet his neighbors, and this gave him the perfect opportunity. Shouting some instructions to the movers, he went over to her.
Laurie saw him coming closer, but she still couldn’t move. She stared intently at his face, wondering if she'd guessed his eye color right. She could have been wrong. Still, when he got closer and she saw his bright blue eyes, she felt something like triumph warm her chest. Then Laurie noticed the rest of him, and realized he was a lot closer now and smiling at her, getting a better look at him up close; she was immediately attracted to him.
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